No one has yet been able to answer (in fact no one has even addressed) the question I've posed several times, which is, if the intent of the founding fathers (again, treating as if they're some monolithic body with one pervading view) when they passed the Second Amendment in 1791 was to have an armed populace that could raise up in rebellion to tyranny, why did those same founding fathers then proceed to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794?

Was their intent just to set up some epic duel? Was it an 18th Century form of a sequester?

I still wonder why, again, given the fact that the founding fathers acted directly against what they had been fighting for only years before, given that many of them were well versed in both legal language as well as etymology language history, given that militias were how the American Revolution was fought and won, and given that, particularly in political discourse, "state" does not always mean "former colony", they chose to put the phrase "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" at the very beginning. Surely no one is going to argue that word placement doesn't matter in the English language...they haven't stopped teaching that in schools, have they?

As long as we're piggybacking. Can any of the gun worshipers here explain, in 18th century context, what a 'well regulated militia' means? Hint: The term "regulated" has changed meaning (in common usage) a lot in the last couple centuries.